Michael Fassbender in Inglourious Basterds

Michael Fassbender must be the only actor ever to have been disappointed when he was cast in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Fassbender became an overnight sensation last year when he played Bobby Sands, the excrement-smearing IRA hunger striker in Hunger, and was immediately hailed as one of the great European actors of his generation. In Tarantino's new second world war romp, Inglourious Basterds, he plays the quintessentially debonair British officer (and film critic) Lieutenant Archie Hicox.

"I was really gunning for the Landa part, to be honest," says Fassbender sheepishly, in his southern Irish accent. The Nazi Colonel Hans Landa is the showy heart of darkness of the piece, the deliciously villainous role that won Christoph Waltz the best actor prize at Cannes in May. Both Landa and Hicox required actors who could speak English and German fluently. When Fassbender found out Tarantino was interested in him, he was working